AZ-104 is not passed by reading alone. The official skills map covers identity, governance, storage, compute, networking, and monitoring. Teams should turn those domains into labs that look like production operations.
Primary source checked on 2026-05-10: Study guide for Exam AZ-104. Use the Microsoft page as the final source of truth before booking an exam or committing a remediation plan.
Who this is for
- IT administrators moving from on-prem infrastructure into Azure operations.
- Team leads planning an internal Azure administrator upskilling program.
- Consultants who need a repeatable AZ-104 readiness checklist for customer teams.
What to work on first
- Create a shared lab subscription with budget alerts, tagging, and cleanup rules before anyone deploys resources.
- Cover each AZ-104 domain with at least one build task and one troubleshooting task.
- Require CLI or PowerShell practice for repeated operations, not only portal screenshots.
Team training angle
The strongest AZ-104 team program combines instructor-led explanation, guided labs, and a final scenario day where participants diagnose broken resources without step-by-step instructions.
One-week action plan
- Day 1: Entra users, groups, RBAC, policies, locks, tags, and budgets.
- Day 2: storage accounts, blobs, files, lifecycle, access keys, SAS, and private access.
- Day 3: VMs, App Service, containers, backup, and recovery.
- Day 4: VNets, subnets, NSGs, peering, load balancing, DNS, and Bastion.
- Day 5: Azure Monitor, alerts, logs, workbook basics, and final troubleshooting scenario.
Where Cloud Evolvers fits
Cloud Evolvers can run AZ-104 as a hands-on administrator course with real labs, cleanup rules, and operational scenarios rather than slide-only prep.